Pine County

Pine County: Working Hard But Not Getting Through

Pine County ranks 86 for broadband access out of 87 counties. They have 40.71 percent coverage to broadband of 100 Mbps down and 20 up. They have 9076 households without access to broadband at that speed. Estimates indicate that it will cost $84.4 million to get to ubiquitous broadband in the county.

Pine County has been actively seeking better broadband for years; they were part of a Blandin Broadband Communities cohort a few years ago. Unfortunately, much of Pine County is served by one large national provider. That may be a bottleneck to better access in those areas due to the lack of competition can impact the drive for improvement.

In December 2022, East Central Energy received $4.8 million to serve approximately 2,082 households, 122 businesses, 329 farms and 2 community anchor institutions currently unserved and underserved in Pine and Kanabec Counties of Minnesota and $4.4 million to serve approximately 2,145 households and 136 businesses, 280 farms, and 2 community anchor institutions, currently unserved and underserved in Kanabec and Pine Counties. East Central Energy and SCI have applied for Border to Border funding in the latest (open round) of funding. They will now hear the results until early 2024.

Pine County residents were awarded 36 line extension funding requests, which means state funding will subsidize last mile broadband extension to their homes.

They are still code red, but that represents their barriers more than their hard work and perseverance.

Below was added Jan 5 with thanks to Lezlie Sauter for her help!!

On our profile page, we are missing some pretty large awards for broadband that have occurred in the past two years:

• In 2021, DEED awarded Pine County $2,787,734 of Community Development Block Grant – Coronavirus funding to serve low and moderate-income areas with fiber to the premise which just started construction this past summer (2023). This project will serve 487 households by the end of 2024.
• Pine County also received a congressionally-directed spending award through USDA ReConnect, in 2022, in the amount of $5,576,250 to construct nearly 300 miles of fiber to 2,440 households. This one is still going through the environmental review process, but should start construction later this year (2024).
• We are working with SCI Broadband on both of these above projects.
• Additionally, we partnered with MidCo this fall to extend their service to a neighborhood using our ARPA funding. This reached just 6 households, but those 6 households would have never received service due to mapping errors.

Just wanted you to be aware since the ECE B2B award was the only one mentioned in the report. We still are at the bottom but we’ve really made some progress in the past couple of years. Between these two projects and ECE’s work, we believe a large percentage of our county will have coverage. We also continue to promote the Broadband Line Extension Program because we have heard from SCI Broadband and Midco that those applications really help them move into areas that were typically too difficult to serve, much faster and easier.